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Another reason to love Linux
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Application optimization reduces disk usage and reclaims space. 🙂
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this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2025
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Technology
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What didn't you like about it? I am just curious; I finally stepped out of using Debian for everything which I have been doing for approximately 200 years, and tried NixOS, and to me it is incredibly nice the way it solves a lot of these issues.
When I tried it it looked really cool. Up until it just.. didn't work. And then looking around I found a bunch of people giving me better snippets of scripts and it was not helpful
But given I just need docker and nothing more, I did not bother and looked further
Huh.
IDK man, my experience is that Nix solves the problem you originally talked about and a bunch of others, pretty effectively. Among other things if things "just... don't work" you can trivially roll back to an earlier working config, and see what changed between working and not-working, and so what would be a pretty grueling debugging process in some other environment becomes pretty easy to sort out.
But whatever. If for some reason Docker makes you more happy and not less, you're welcome to it and best of luck.
Perhaps it's improved over the last year, I can give it a shot. But yes, for my own packaged applications without shared dependencies, docker is handy. And that's exclusively what I run
I mean if it makes you happy, I won't tell you to do anything different. I think a certain amount of it is just prejudice against Docker on my part. Just in my experience NixOS is the best of both worlds: You can have a single coherent system if everything in that system can play nice with each other, and if not, then things can be containerized completely that way still works too. And then on top it has a couple of other nice features like rolling back configs easily, or source builds that get slotted in in-place as if they were standard packages (which is generally where I abandon Docker installs of things, because making changes to the source seems like it's going to be a big hassle).
I'm not trying to evangelize though, you should in all seriousness just do what you find to be effective.
Hold up, nix added containerization? How did I miss that? I will have another look now!
Also, you're right. For small quick scripts docker can be a hassle. Nowadays though I add building a docker image as part of my project's build/compilation process. The main reason I do this is so that I can work with whatever machine I happen to be on, then just copy paste the app to whatever machine I want it on. No extra config or even a look at the environment required. Just install docker and forget about the rest
update: installing docker on nixos (on a vm) with a nix package failed, not sure why. Perhaps some dependencies were no longer available?
update: nix is is available as a docker image. I'm running it now, we shall see how it goes
Nix is containerization. Here is firing up a temporary little container with a new python version and then throwing it away once I'm done with it (although you can also do this with more complicated setups, this is just showing doing it with one thing only):
The whole "system" you get when moving from Nix to NixOS is basically just a composition of a whole bunch of individual packages like python39 was, in one big container that is "the system." But you can also fire up temporary containers trivially for particular things. I have a couple of tools with source in
~/srcwhich, whenever I change the source,nix-os rebuildwill automatically fire up a little container to rebuild them in (with their build dependencies which don't have to be around cluttering up my main system). If it works, it'll deploy the completed product into my main system image for me, but if it doesn't then nothing will have changed (and either way it throws away the container it used to attempt the build in).Each config change spawns a new container for the main system OS image ("generation"), but you can roll back to one of the earlier generations (which are, from a functional perspective, still around) if you want or if you broke something.
And so on. It's very nice.
Aw, meh. From what I saw it's more like a jail, there's no imaging the containers